Jan Balbierz

Artykuł poświęcony jest tematyce czytania w Dziennikach Kafki, a także tematom korporalności oraz kanonu literackiego. Dzienniki są jednym z najważniejszych paratekstów do opowiadań i powieści praskiego autora. Wątek korporalności i powiązanie doświadczeń cielesnych – przede wszystkim choroby – z twórczością literacką przewija się przez całość Dzienników. W artykule argumentuję, że mówiąc o bólu i chorobie, Kafka z jednej strony wpisuje się w konwencjonalny, typowy dla przełomu wieków obraz nerwowego, nadwrażliwego piszącego mężczyzny z klasy średniej, z drugiej zaś strony nieustannie doświadcza autentycznego bólu i cierpienia związanego przede wszystkim z trapiącą go gruźlicą. W artykule ukazuję różne tryby czytania pojawiające się w Dziennikach (czytanie na głos, współ-czytanie) i przedstawia, w jaki sposób Kafka formował swój prywatny, ekscentryczny kanon literacki.

The paper deals with the opera The Bacchae from 1991, a collaboration between Swedish composer Daniel Börtz and Ingmar Bergman. It was one of the three operas Bergman ever directed. The paper examines The Bacchae in a broad context of modernist reception of Greek tragedy and mythology – an especially important frame of reference is the Dionysian, post-Wagnerian opera – and against the backdrop of Bergman’s other film and theatre productions that deal with his highly ambiguous relation to religion.
Bergman incorporated some major themes of European Modernism in his staging. The Bacchae can be read as a part of the “invented tradition” of the black, antilogocentric, violent, obscene antiquity, created around 1900 as an opposition to the bright Winckelmann – inspired version of the past. This dark vision of the archaic roots of human culture corresponds with other modernist topics such as the crisis of language and the attempt to create alternative, body-­-based modes of expression, the blurring of gender identities, the transgressive nature of art and religion and the conception of music as a representation of the “oceanic” unconscious.
 

My paper focuses on the corporeal discourse in James Joyce’s Ulysses, called by the author “the epic of the human body”. I use Foucault’s category of the ancient “regimens” of diet and sexuality; according to The History of Sexuality those referred not so much to medical recommendations as to the art of living. The paper claims that the concept of regimens was still alive in the Modernist culture. For Nietzsche, physiology was a fundamental science and his whole anthropology was built upon it. The management of body functions, dietetic schemes, walks and the choice of a proper climate were essential for his philosophy of life. The paper defines Bloom’s corporeal regimen in Ulysses as one that celebrates the body and affirms life in its material forms. Bloom’s relaxed rules on sexuality and consumption and his joyful glorification of the material world (as in chapter four where he prepares a kidney and chapter seventeen where he opens two drawers that – among other things – include a variety of objects and representations of the human body) can be seen as a Modernist counter-project to the disciplining “ascetic ideals” of the Christian tradition.